From my diary

Lots of work this afternoon. The translator writing direct to the typesetter with instructions caused quite a flurry! But the situation is now under control and I’m back in the middle, vetting and batching up changes. It’s quite impossible for anyone to do something like typesetting with two people issuing instructions anyway.

So it meant that this afternoon I had to boil down all the emails and turn them into something sensible. I ended up using features of Adobe Acrobat which I have not used before. What I did was right-click in the area I needed to change, and choose “Add sticky”. This put a postit-like box on the page, which I could position in the margin and add notes in. I also highlighted text that was changing.

This is a very good way of sending corrections to the original language.

Another thing that came in was a revised translation of the first four letters of Isidore of Pelusium. I commissioned a sample of these, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. This version is much better, and the footnotes are good. The English is still a bit tortured, tho. I’ve gone through it and marked up queries and so forth in blue. I think the result might well be do-able, tho. A couple of sentences had no main clause, tho, which is worrying (and might be a feature of Isidore’s text, which is very abbreviated).

I also had an email from the chap in India who transcribed a bunch of Syriac text for me for the web a while ago. Apparently he’s on the market again. I think I’ll get him to do the letter of Mara bar Serapion. It might be interesting if he could translate some Syriac for me. But people whose first language is not English tend to have difficulty with this.

Life is pretty busy for me at the moment. In real life I am trying to get a new job, and the agency I am dealing with are being very difficult to deal with. I was supposed to start on Monday; after weeks of delay, after sitting here all day twitching, the contract was emailed to me at 5:50 pm! And when I look at it… it’s not what I was supposed to get. Indeed it’s horrible in places. So I’m rather tired and hope everyone will make allowances.